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Dear Charmy, why I’m still ambivalent about Sabarimala

I can’t speak for Shashi Tharoor or Manu Joseph, but much of your article rebutting mine made sense to me. I respect your clarity, but still don’t share it.

There’s a lot of “I” in this response, but since you addressed me personally and imputed motives, I have to speak for myself.

To your point about devotees and activists: of course men and women are not one or the other, people can be liberal devotees, faithful feminists, etc. May those tribes and overlaps increase. ‘Faith versus feminism’ is not a formulation I chose, it was the headline given to it, and the whole point of my article was to move from ‘versus’ to ‘and’.

Your piece made me reconsider some of my assertions. You’re right, I don’t know if the presence of women is registered as ‘an encroachment by most believers’. My feelings come from an abstract solicitude rather than sharing their faith or understanding their disposition, so it is possible that I’m exaggerating their injuries. Maybe many of the true pilgrims recognise the ardent desire of female pilgrims to enter their fold. It’s hard to tell, given the din of the “reactionary right and the rationalist left” as I had put it.

I’m truly moved by your idea of a place of worship being an ‘open’ rather than an ‘inviolable’ space. I keep a respectful distance from religious practice, but I see the higher stakes in getting involved and bending it towards justice. I am indeed an outsider, not intimately concerned with Sabarimala, and from my distanced point of view, I saw it as one peculiar custom among many, that there are diversities in religion, the state must be careful with fixing non-standard practices of any kind, even those you don’t agree with have the right to their non-harmful practices, etc (the stuff I said in my article). I am not undermining your cause, but I don’t share its urgency. You can call it ‘fraud liberalism’ or elite obliviousness, but it is my perspective on this complicated issue.

Here is where I remain unconvinced:
Sabarimala is one outlier shrine that doesn’t want to see women, because of the beliefs around the deity. It is not Hinduism Central, it is not the norm. So I was not advocating apartheid when I said women can worship at other Ayyappa shrines or devise their own way of worship. The norm is gender-mingled, but there is this one solitary custom. My argument is emphatically not the same as telling the underprivileged of Travancore to go to their own roads and shrines and schools. If gender exclusion was standard practice, then I would be on the revolutionary side too — but it’s not. So I limit myself to supporting the call for truly representative temple boards and religious authorities. And suggest reconciliation in religious terms, as a sustainable solution, for those who care strongly about the Sabarimala Ayyappan on both sides.

You wonder if I want to influence the court judgement on Sabarimala – I don’t. As if 🙂 A legal ban is not justifiable. I expressed concern for those who feel for the custom – which goes back a long enough time and is what the current community is invested in. I wrote my piece because it seemed to me that there was a case for both sides here, and there was a lot of absolutist horrified handwringing about Shashi Tharoor for being ambivalent, but it’s an ambivalence I share.

Fundamentally – and I may be wrong – I don’t hear the resonance with the anti-caste temple entry movement, which you used to great rhetorical effect, and which the CPM is building its plank around. From what I know, Sabarimala has been actively welcoming of all castes and religions, it just bars women of childbearing age because of its currently operating story.

I am perfectly okay with changing this Sabarimala custom, as a pressure-group of women, but I think it needs to be on mutually intelligible terms – ie, by recasting the legend, the sacred story in some form. It’s possible that this religious storytelling was happening at a frequency I haven’t heard – or that this is a hopeless effort in the current standoff. All I’m saying is, those who want to go in, and their champions, should tell their stories in terms of faith, manifest their resistance in words of faith, rather than supplanting the current believers or posing rational disagreements. This may seem conservative and blind to existing power differentials, from your point of view. But I’m not prejudging the outcome or what story should triumph. It’s an argument about *how* it should happen, not *what* should happen.

This seems important to me because faith is a flammable thing in India, and the BJP-RSS are using Sabarimala to prove a point to outsiders too. These violent casteist RSS-NSS gatekeepers are not the average Sabarimala-going pilgrim. I resist their call to homogenise this as ‘Hinduism under assault’. And to you, I submit again – a single practice is not a system. To outline the harms is important when you seek to change other people’s single, self-sufficient practice. The totalising argument of purity and pollution, which conflates one particular gendered practice with systematic caste exclusion, doesn’t settle the argument for me. The men who go are just living by a familiar practice and myth around a celibate deity, not necessarily climbing that hill because they have contempt for women. Horrid menstrual taboos do exist in the wider religion and society, but that can’t be all that Sabarimala beliefs boil down to. I’m not denying the gender discrimination in Kerala, or the oppressive cage of purity, but I don’t see Sabarimala as the sole and clinching proof of it, to make an example of it.

From my zoomed-out point of view, I’m uncomfortable with the larger repercussions of the state standardising religious practices. Though there is constitutional warrant for a principled intervention in Hinduism, I am not persuaded by the social injustice of this lone custom (and the orchestrated aggression of BJP lot doesn’t prove it to me). So my instinct is to leave it alone, since it is one singular thing and not the overweening tradition. While I have no problem with anyone’s feminist zeal around Sabarimala, and I’d be glad if the place includes rather than excludes, I don’t share the urge to stamp out this one randomly recalcitrant man-cave. And I care deeply about women’s rights and social equality. This may not make sense to a totalitarian worldview, but there it is.

I also don’t share your conviction that ‘myths are devices of dominance’ or “fig leaves of Hinduism” alone. Religious faith is not entirely reducible to power relations. There is ideology at work everywhere, but the pilgrims are not just following social scripts, they’re also seeking something numinous. And they’re embedded in a certain context. So I’m uncomfortable with justifying entry mainly in the language of rights, without an effort at religious reconciliation. We don’t owe it as women to justify ourselves, but because we’re entering a particular way of worship that has so far hinged on keeping its distance — because two communities with incommensurable beliefs are contending for Sabarimala. The BJP-RSS, the bigots and utter status-quoists have distorted the scene, but I do know people who have gone to Sabarimala and are not trying to enact gender and caste dominance. So Sabarimala should not be instrumentally used for ideological combat, it should be either a harmonising of sincere faiths or a living with differences, in my view.

I think it’s important to convey the effort with a social groundswell, as a community of seekers, rather than go in as individuals with a secret, burning connection to Ayyappan or a social point to prove. Because while the Reshma you speak of might have waited in the fierceness of her penance, it is unclear to the existing community of pilgrims what she believes, who she’s praying to, or what makes her different from the other activists who don’t. She doesn’t owe anyone an explanation if you think of her individual rights alone or the shining glory of her private beliefs, but if you think of it as a difficult social transition that involves two sets of people, then it is worth making the effort.

Maybe social-religious transitions are rough and adversarial, maybe one side has to subdue the other. So they say. When it comes to singular practices as opposed to general models, I prefer negotiated settlements between groups, especially about things held so close to the heart. In the tug of war between the right and left, I know that’s unlikely to happen.

So those are our differences. You have a rousing, clear case, but I don’t agree.